Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/76

54 54 HISTORY OF THE the second book, in which this humorous tone is most apparent, was written by the ancient Homer or by one of the later Homerids. Zeus undertakes to deceive Agamemnon, for, by means of a dream, he gives him great courage for the battle. Agamemnon himself adopts a second deceit against the Achaeans, for he, though full of the hopes of victory, yet persuades the Achseans that he has determined on the return home ; in this, however, his expectations are again deceived in a ludicrous man- ner by the Greeks, whom he had only wished to try, in order to stimu- late them to the battle, but who now are determined to fly in the ut- most haste, and, contrary to the decree of fate, to leave Troy uninjured, if Ulysses, at the suggestion of the gods, had not held them back. Here is matter for an entire mythical comedy, full of fine irony, and with an amusing plot, in which the deceiving and deceived Agamemnon is the chief character ; who, with the words, " Zeus has played me a pretty trick*," at the same time that he means to invent an ingenious false- hood, unconsciously utters an unpleasant truth. But this Homeric comedy, which is extended through the greater part of the second book, cannot possibly belong to the original plan of the Iliad ; for Agamem- non, two days later, complaining to the Greeks of being deceived by former signs of victory which Zeus had shown him, uses in earnest the same words which he had here used in joke f. But it is not conceivable that Agamemnon (if the laws of probability were respected) should be represented as able seriously to repeat the complaint which he had before feigned, without, at the same time, dwelling on the inconsistency be- tween his present and his former opinion. Tt is, moreover, evident, that the graver and shorter passage did not grow out of the more comic and longer one ; but that the latter is a copious parody of the former, composed by a later Homerid, and inserted in the room of an original shorter account of the arming of the Greeks. § 9. But of all the parts of the Iliad, there is none of which the dis- crepancies with the rest of the poem are so manifest as the Cata- logue of the Ships, already alluded to. Even the ancients had critical doubts on some passages ; as, for instance, the manifestly intentional association of the ships of Ajax with those of the Athenians, which appears to have been made solely for the interest of the Athenian houses (the Eurysacids and Philaids), which deduced their origin from Ajax ; and the mention of the Pavhellenians, whom (contrary to Homer's invariable usage) the Locrian Ajax surpasses in the use of the spear. But still more important are the mythico-historical discrepancies between the Catalogue and the Iliad itself. Meges, the son of Phyleus, is in the Catalogue King of Dulichium ; in the Iliad J, King of the Epeans, dwelling in Elis. The Catalogue here follows the tradition, which was " II. 11. 114, vtJv Vi kclxyiv a,-jtArw (>>ovtii<ra.To. f II. ii. Hi— 18 and 139—41 correspond to II. ix. 18—23. % II. xiii. 69.2; xv. 519.